Marie sits in the lush garden, a place that still amazes her: lime trees and lemon trees and orange trees and even a grapefruit tree, though its grapefruits are the size of lemons. There is a small statue of Buddha on a lotus, water trickling over his round, greened belly; the sound is the sound of water. The smell is the smell of eucalyptus. The home is the home of Jules’s new partner, Larry.
“Oh,” she had said.
She sits in the lush garden watching Larry decorate the fruit trees for a party, stringing colored lights and tinsel. In her honor, Jules has told her. They have invited their set.
The wanderings of her vivid imagination stay on the mantel—Larry preferring not to tack the wall: he isn’t into nails and wires, he says, but he’s delighted to keep it there behind his collection of vintage glass.I
The call is for her, Jules says. He stands with the telephone in his hand, a look on his face, then moves to where Larry hangs the lights, near the roses where a few weeks back Larry released a bag of ladybugs to eat the aphids, ladybugs she has picked from her clothing since she arrived, counting their spots just for fun, announcing their age. Jules is saying something to Larry, leaning into Larry, as she listens to Simone’s Katherine.
“I don’t know how to tell you,” Katherine’s begun, words Marie hears and quickly buries.
Simone!
A taxi at the dangerous crossing at Ninth and Twenty-Third—so close to her mother’s apartment and she’d always warned—a crowd, some Samaritan fashioning a blanket from a coat then something else; the ambulance arrived within minutes too late. Marie listens and then she does not. Then she watches as her son and his partner lean into one another in the sunlight, watches as the two of them—in an instant—disappear. Abe used to do that walking home: disappear. She waited for him on the stoop, waited for him to turn the corner and put his hand up. Remember how he put his hand up? Waving? A happy man, Mother had said—this to Sylvie or perhaps Rose, the two fingertip curls and an occasional lipstick—be sure to marry a happy man.
They had bought the house in Chelsea for a song; they were pilgrims, adventurers. Look, look! Abe had said: the Monticello banister hewn from a single tree, chiseled smooth pumpkin wood—extinct!—and shipped all the way from the Carolinas, the planks as wide as the beams for the king’s mast. Look! Look! Abe had said. Now soon he will turn the corner and she is waiting, waiting, watching for his wave, his smile. The light may very well swallow him whole. She grips the thick limb in anticipation, the cold bark on her palms, the tree alive with bees. Beneath her, blackened fruit litters the ground. Apricots. She could break her back but still she strains to see against the sunset glare reflected in the polished windows of St. Claire’s Rectory. Soon Abe will be home, she knows. Soon. She has been waiting here forever, she will tell him; she was feeling all alone.
I. She will take it back, she’s decided—its suns and moons and forest thick with spruce and what you cannot see, what’s hidden there—when she returns. She will sneak it into her suitcase and carry it to New York and if Jules asks she’ll tell him there is more to do, that it is a work in progress.